Short Google Outage Proves That People Really Rely on Google

You may have missed Friday night’s brief Google outage, as it took place between 7:52 and 7:57 p.m. EST, when saner people tend to have torn themselves away from their computers in order to start the weekend. Still, the one- to five-minute glitch — which affected not only the search engine, but GMail, YouTube, Google Drive, and other properties — led to a 40 percent drop in overall Internet traffic while it was taking place, according to analytics firm GoSquared. “As internet users, our reliance on google.com being up is huge,” was their somewhat obvious assessment of the situation. “It’s also of note that pageviews spiked shortly afterwards, as users managed to get to their destination.” So, basically, people either spent the little blackout freaking out on Twitter or clicking “refresh” over and over — and no one thought to tryBing.